"Daffy's Rhapsody" talkback
"The Snow Queen" trailer
"Arrietty" Will Be Ghibli's Biggest US Release Yet
Ricky Garduno, RIP
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TAG FOR “Classic”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
July 22, 2008 12:05 am
Leon Schlesinger died on Christmas Day, 1949. He sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944 and spent his last years in an executive job at the studio, the first one dedicated to merchandising the cartoon characters. While he wasn’t technically “Bugs Bunny’s Creator” (as his obituaries claimed) he was a significant figure in the creation of a dozen pop culture icons that will literally live forever. His obituaries from the Los Angeles Times (below left) and Los Angeles Examiner (below right) are fitting tributes. Click on each thumbnail for larger images: 20 Comments » posted in Classic 
July 21, 2008 3:00 am
To answer the many inquires they received at the time, Warner Bros. produced a three page pamphlet, in comic strip style, to explain the production of animation cartoons. Clearly the work of a lower level assistant artist, the artwork isn’t so good, but the information in this 1956 handout is essentially accurate. Click the thumbnails below to see the pages full size. According to this piece, Fifteen months and fifteen thousand drawings are required to create a Warner Bros. cartoon. Note the caricature of Eddie Selzer (the producer) in panel #1 and Beaky Buzzard in panel #7. Adding fuel to the ongoing script versus storyboard controversy, Bugs is shown typing a story in panel #2, while Daffy is sketching the storyboard in panel #3.
21 Comments » posted in Classic
July 18, 2008 9:30 am
There is still a lot of research to be done in documenting the silent era of animation. Leonard Maltin reports, on his Movie Crazy blog, of the screening of a true rarity/oddity at the recent San Francisco Silent Film Festival: …a 1925 animated cartoon in two-color Technicolor. The Old Family Toothbrush features a character named Kid Noah in “A New Redhead Satire” filmed in Naturecolor, using the Wilson Wetherald Process. It was so startling to see a cartoon of this vintage in color that I picked up my camera and tried to capture a few frames (above)… The short itself is fairly amusing, executed in fairly typical New York cartoon-studio fashion of the period, with impressive personality animation of its leading character. Still, its origins are something of a mystery: the picture wasn’t registered for copyright, and I can find no evidence of it in my usual reference sources. Do any of our readers have some clues about this mysterious new discovery? 10 Comments » posted in Classic
July 11, 2008 9:20 am
I admit it. I love seeing classic animation I’ve never seen before. I particularly go nuts for original title sequences of cartoons that had been cut 50 years ago for TV broadcast. Long time readers of this site already know this. So what is so unusual about this Popeye card above? It’s simply the rarely seen opening graphic to the first post-Fleischer Popeye cartoons. This title treatment (above) only appears at the head of two cartoons – You’re A Sap, Mr. Jap and Alona On The Sarong Seas (both 1942) – immediately after the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer. The next release (A Hull Of A Mess) is the first to proclaim the series “A Famous Studios Production” (the new entity created to produce cartoons for Paramount release), and feature a new animated title treatment. More about Popeye opening titles appear here, and Popeye Vol. 3 goes on sale September 30th (amazon link). 16 Comments » posted in Classic
July 10, 2008 12:21 am
Just out from Steve Stanchfield’s Thunderbean Animation is Cultoons 3, a new DVD set which continues his madness of releasing cartoons that only us die hards would care about. This set features all the uber-rare 1939 Gran’ Pop Monkey series as well as Boyd La Vero’s lost Marty the Monk cartoons. It also has the eccentric foreign-toon Mr. E from Tow City and the Walter Lantz wartime rarity, The Enemy Bacteria. Trust me, this is oddball material, expertly curated and lots of fun. Stanchfield is doing all of us a big favor – rounding up the odds and ends of cartoon history, using the best prints he can find of the most obscure cartoons ever made. Another new release of note, Grotesqueries: Ghosts, Goblins & Other Magical Moving Picture Illusions is from Blue Mouse Studio (Thunderbean will be distributing it). Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider (with some help from Stanchfield) produced this fantastic DVD featuring all sorts of goodies, both animated and otherwise (and a bunch of really great bonus features. They’ve done a really beautiful job with all the graphics and design… its been in progress for over 2 years! It’s a pretty unusual and cool DVD. It also features a restoration of A Night On Bald Mountain, the 1933 Pinscreen classic by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker – the best it’s ever looked (restored and licensed from Cecile Starr). Highly recommended! 4 Comments » posted in Classic
July 1, 2008 6:30 am
This Wednesday, July 2nd, Stuart Shostack will broadcast a rare, new, interview with Max Fleischer’s nephew, Bernie Fleischer. Joined by Fleischer Studios historian Ray Pointer, Stu promises that the interview will cover everything from the invention of the Rotoscope and the Helen Kane lawsuit, to the 1937 strike, the move to Miami and the eventual Paramount takeover. Plus, Bernie will talk about visiting the studio during the 1930s and recording his voice tracks for the Fleischer’s 1940 two-reeler, Raggedy Ann and Andy (he was Andy). The show will be broadcast over internet radio live (which means no downloads), beginning Wednesday July 2 at 7pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific. It’ll be rebroadcast each day for the next six days at the the same time. Listen to it here. 1 Comment » posted in Classic, Internet/Blogs
June 28, 2008 4:00 pm
Here’s a rare treat: El Mono Relojero (The Clockmaking Monkey – Argentina, 1938) is only surviving film by the creator of the first animated feature (El Apostol, 1917), Quirino Cristiani (who also created the world’s first animated sound feature, Peludópolis in 1931). The rest of his films perished in a fire in 1962. Oscar Grillo says the voice is by Pepe Iglesias (aka “El Zorro”), the actor who later dubbed into Spanish the voice of the fox in Disney’s Pinocchio. A few months ago Jorge Finkielman posted a rare cel from this film on the Animation Show forum. For more about Cristiani, read Giannalberto Bendazzi’s 1983 article on AWN. 9 Comments » posted in Classic
June 24, 2008 10:24 am
Cima Balser, the wife of animation director Bob Balser, has written a fantastic piece for AWN about the early years of the Annecy International Animation Festival. As much fun as it is to attend the festival nowadays, I can only imagine the excitement of those glory years when one could mingle lakeside with the likes of Bobe Cannon, Chuck Jones, John and Faith Hubley, Pete Burness, Bill Littlejohn, George Dunning, Peter Foldes, Yoji Kuri, and all the other greats of animation that I so admire. Cima’s article is one of my favorite historical reads in recent months, and she offers many wonderful stories about the festival that I’d never heard, such as this one about the Hubleys:
6 Comments » posted in Classic, Events, Bob Balser, Chuck Jones, George Dunning, The Hubleys, Yoji Kuri
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